How to fully customise 2011 theme to look like this

Hi, I am completely new to wordpress so may sound a little daft but here goes anyway!

I want to be able to fully customise the 2011 theme so that it has a very simlar layout to this website: http://cure.org/

I have so far, uploaded a child theme to work on, slidedeck and the wp e-commerce plugin (the site will be a multimedia magazine/store).

So, what would be the best themes/plugins to use to create a similar layout and would it be possible to achieve by merely editing the CSS without touching any PHP? If so, any pointers as to what exactly I will need to edit?

Using a child theme is the right path but you really will need to learn a few PHP licks if you want to do your own customizations. You might be able to pull it off with just CSS, but PHP isn’t hard to pick up. Some themes are more customizable than others. The Thematic theme is a popular theme that can be customized, though there are others. I’d stick to themes from wordpress.org since many free themes you’ll find elsewhere on the internet are corrupted with malware and backdoors.